For anyone that’s noticed… I’ve now moved to WordPress. I even managed to import all the old articles and images. The old Blogspot blog can still be found at tetraetc.blogspot.com if you so desire, but all new posts shall be on here. (Nope, there’s a redirect in place… Excellent!)

Don’t worry, it’s still going to be located at the same URL, not that many people actually read my blog, although I had some interesting traffic statistics this past week.

Apparently this last Monday I got really popular in Israel.

Yeah, not sure what happened there. I certainly didn’t post anything that day, and as far as I know I didn’t do any advertising there.

Anyway, back to the move.

As most of you should be aware, I’ve been hosting this blog using Google’s Blogger. I will be moving over to a WordPress system in the upcoming days. This will allow me to host some cooler stuff on my site, hopefully. Although I’m not entirely sure exactly how cool said things will be.

Onto in game news, I’ve been doing a lot of PI lately. I believe this is a documented bug, but I get incredibly annoyed with Extractor Control Units. You survey for deposits, move your heads around, it says “8000 units per hour”

Ok cool, let’s submit this.

The next number can be 500, or it might be 7000. It’s never the same number though. This is incredibly frustrating.

Beyond that, I’ve got my planets nice and set up, although Forsaken Asylum have now wardeced that corp. Such is life though.

After I posted the other day, I noticed I had a number of drafts saved that for some reason weren’t published. So I published them, even though they were a few months old.

Anyway…

It’s that time again! Time to cast your votes for CSM.

Below is my election ballot list/suggestion.

Bam Stroker

Sabriz Adoudel

Cagali Cagali

Thoic Frosthammer

Mike Azariah

Jayne Fillon

Angrod Losshelin

Leelo dallsmultipas

Klapen

UAxDEATH

DomanarK

Vaari

Harry Saq

June Ting

Why did I do this order?

Well, I used the Eve CSM matcher, and put all the Australians as 1-3, and then put the next 11 people in. Australian Timezone has unique problems, that these three will know and be able to represent. The next 11 were the top matchs for my results, with the excpetion of some people I removed because they failed a critical question.

Programming has become a large part of my current eve experience. Specifically I have been spending a lot of time working on an insurance program for TVP. Doing this programming has led me to come across interesting complexities of the API, and has made me much more appreciative of the tools that are out there, Evemon, Pyfa, EFT etc.

As well as this, I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of things that are out there that are cool that can be done, or could be done, but due to limitations from CCP we simply can’t do.

As well as this I’m having a lot of fun just learning more programming tricks and what not. Currently I’m having a lot of fun trying to generate a good estimate of CCPs values for insurance payouts, and boy is it annoying. Having to put all those values from blueprint info in game into an excel spreadsheet so I can view data etc. Big pain in the but.

I often think about starting a new corp, and trying my best to make it work. Various corp ideas have crossed my mind over my time in the game, industry mega corps – incursion corps – etc, and indeed I’ve even tried my hand at it.

One of the limiting factors in any corps success however, are the webservices they have/can offer. How many people would join a corp/alliance that didn’t have some form of voice communications, and if it’s a null sec corp you probably wouldn’t consider it at all if they didn’t have jabber or an equivalent.

Why is it that we consider these services to be so essential to our gameplay? I mean sure, they are rather useful to our game play.Teamspeak is incredibly useful for fleet ops etc.Jabber is useful to ensure that people are aware of things that are going on in game, when they’re not in game.Forums can be useful for coordinating and discussing game related things, out of game (Without causing a string of RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:FW:RE:RE:FW: in your eve-mail inbox.

But this is a game after all… Why do we determine these things to be so necessary to our… game?

That being said I’ve started playing Ingress on my phone lately, and of course we use Google Hangouts to co-ordinate for the local agents. We find it incredibly more useful than the in game chat, as it allows us to keep it localised and preventing us from spamming the rest of the faction, with stuff that only affects us and not everyone else.

But when we already have in game audio chat, can use eve gate and eve forums for forum posts, and could always modify some api program for pinging purposes, why do we rely so much on other programs/services?

More than likely… because they’re better, and offer us more control over how they’re used.

That being said – in eve our “faction” is a small faction, not the entire world. In eve, our communications in game are easily read.

Why do we care if the facilities aren’t up to scratch, do we actually need them?

The most recent dev blog is on that did just that. We all know CCP look at data when making design change/balance decisions, but too often they don’t disclose that with us, and just make the changes, or don’t make changes. In this blog, they’ve sat down, looked at several issues people had been talking about, looked at the data, and made their decisions. Not only that, they’ve explained to us the data they used to make those decisions, and why they made the decisions they did. The Ishtar nerf makes me a little sad though because I never got to use one!

This is amazing. This is how the 6 week release cycle should be working, the entire time! Good work CCP.

In other, personal, eve news: I’ve not had much time to play lately, mainly because I’ve been getting distracted by work etc. Coming home and flying from system to system just to incursion isn’t something I have time for any more, and as such I will be retiring from the incursion scene in the not too distant future. Most likely I will consolidate my assets and make a move down to null sec for a while, or I’ll look for a possible home in Hi-sec for my toons.

A cross server tournament, with the most recent winners from our alliance tournament, and the winners of a recent tournament on Serenity.

The prize: A variation of the Opux luxury yacht.

Very interesting thing to do, and I hope that it all goes well. I do hope we win it! I think one of the most interesting things that will come out of this is to see the different Metas that they use on Serenity, and how they line up against the Metas that have been developed on Tranquility.

Do they have tactics our tournament teams haven’t thought of yet, do they have metas that can break our current metas with ease? Do we have metas that will smash through theirs?

It’s definitely going to be something that I’ll be waiting for the recordings of!

In other news, I’ve been picking up my activity in null sec lately, although haven’t got on many kills lately. With work being more consistent I’m beginning to see why null sec is so popular! Incursions are very much something that you need to put a lot of effort into. Moving ships around etc. Null sec, it’s all there! Buy what you need as you need it, jump in shoot/get shot continue!

I’m also able to blog a bit more now, and will hopefully make a few more appearances on the Eve Downunder show of Friday Nights (AUTZ) at about 1030 eve time. You should all tune in!

But anyway, recently CCP issued a statement about Hyperdunking being a viable tactic, and not an exploit.

After meeting with members of the game design and customer support teams and discussing this in depth, we have come to the consensus that due to the fact no rules are being broken and any ship that is involved in a criminal act is being destroyed by CONCORD as intended, that this tactic is simply an unintended but legitimate use of new game mechanics, and is not in breach of the rules. Tactics similar to this have been used with previous hulls before the Bowhead was introduced, and have been considered perfectly legitimate in the past.

I disagree. Just because each ship is being destroyed, doesn’t mean that this is working as intended. This is definitely a way of evading concords punishment.

Imagine someones car is parked illegally, and the police come and have the car towed and issue a fine. The person who owns the car happens to be the owner of the tow company, and instead of towing it to the impound, the owner just tows it back home and parks illegally after paying the parking fine. That wouldn’t be ok now would it?

The old boomerang mechanic was evading concord, simply by warping out before your ship could get destroyed. This is avoiding concord simply by removing the penalty of their punishment. “Oh, you destroyed my ship, cool. I’ve got another 300 in my alt’s ship over there”

Evading Concord shouldn’t just be limited to evading their punishment, but it should also be expanded to evading the short time penalties of their punishment.

(Grinding sec status back up/sec status tags is a different topic entirely)

So – For those that can’t stitch this all together, what happened was a member of SMA accidentally called out for reps on a BL tengu that was going down. (It was broadcasted as a target and he went to rep the broadcast)

This of course made people rather suspicious. After he realised his mistake, he than apologised and went about his way.Goons weren’t satisfied and looked into this player, and started looking for evidence that he was a spy.

And they found some!The player lived in the same general vicinity of a BL player, and was interested in going to a local EVE meetup, although Mittens would have you believe that the player already had been to meet ups and was best buddies with BL. But no, he hadn’t met anyone yet.

Now the pilot has been blacklisted from the CFC and has decided to unsub from eve.

This raises a few questions.

What should be considered clear evidence of someone being a spy?Is “They met player X at fanfest” >really< a valid reason to think someone is a spy?